The Neonatal Intensive Care Unit (NICU) is a unit of a hospital specializing in the care of ill or premature newborn infants. Approximately 500,000 babies born in the United States each year are treated in a neonatal intensive care unit with the most common causes for admission being premature birth, difficult delivery, breathing problems, infections, and birth defects.
NICU protocols specify continuous monitoring of vital signs, to alert caregivers of a deteriorating condition or an emergent event. These events can develop slowly, as in hyperkalemia, which can lead to cardiac arrhythmia, or can appear suddenly, as commonly seen in respiratory distress. Current monitoring techniques rely heavily on ECG technology which requires direct skin contact via adhesive electrodes and are thus highly undesirable due to the need for skin contact. Premature babies have extremely delicate skin that is susceptible to damage and infection, increasing their risk of complications and potentially extending their time in the NICU. Premature babies younger than 30 to 32 weeks have thin skin, lacking the layers of body fat that would have been put on during the final weeks of pregnancy. In extremely premature babies, the coarse, top layer of skin hasn't yet formed. During their stay in the NICU, every attempt is made to minimize skin contact, even limiting physical contact by parents and caregivers.
Besides the potential for complications resulting from direct placement of electrodes on the infant's skin, there is an identified need to reduce the amount of physical contact to the neonatal intensive care patient since contact is known to stress the infant and can compromise recovery and development. Thus, monitoring technologies that minimize placement of electrodes on the patient as well as minimize the need for caregivers to touch the patient to collect vital signs information are highly desirable.
Thus, there is a need for non-contact baby/infant monitors, and this need is particularly acute in the NICU context. A number of variations of non-contact UWB sensors have been proposed, such as those offered by Sensiotec, and described in U.S. Pat. No. 7,432,847 and U.S. 2009/0227882. However, these devices suffer from limitations inherent in their configuration resulting in a loss of signal strength. This loss of signal strength results in less efficient devices, and may limit the penetration and accuracy. Thus, it would be useful to provide systems, devices and methods for monitoring an infant, and particularly an infant in an NICU setting in a reliable, low-energy and non-contact fashion. Described herein are systems, devices and methods that may address this need.